Half Life 3 Reference Spotted in Dota 2 UGC Tools

How long has it been since we played Half Life 2? Over a decade I believe and since then, fans have been requesting Valve to develop a third installment but no! Valve kept has kept its quiet on the matter.

Over the years, many references to Half Life 3 were spotted and now once again another reference to the game has appeared. The latest was spotted by a NeoGaf user and is from Dota 2 UGC tools. There is a line of code which features this reference.

The reference is located in a file (%STEAM_HOME%\SteamApps\common\dota 2 beta\dota_ugc\game\bin\win32\tools\model_editor.dll). You can see an image of it below.

Now I don’t have much knowledge of these things, but according to the Gaf user it “looks like a call to a physics test program is made here with the parameter “-game” to be “HL3” and “-open” to be something undefined, probably the name of the object to be tested.”

Moreover, the reference has been their since February 3. Practically, it could mean anything but I want it to be associated with Half Life 3.

Back in 2014, Counter-Strike co-creator Minh Le stated that Half Life 3 is indeed in development and he has seen some concept art as well.

Here’s what he had to say:

So if I were to say I’ve seen some images, like some concept art of it, that wouldn’t be big news. But I guess I could say that I did see something that looked like kind of like in the Half-Life universe. It wouldn’t surprise anyone if I said ‘Yeah, they’re working on it.’ So I mean, to go out on a limb, I would say yeah, I did see some concept art for Half-Life 3.

In my personal opinion, I do believe that Half Life 3 is in development but it can’t be said for sure if we will have our first look anytime soon.